Pabst Brewing Company Complex

About this property

The Pabst Brewery Complex northwest of downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was the former brewery of the Pabst Brewing Company until 1997. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. In 1844 Jacob Best Sr., an immigrant from Mettenheim, Germany, founded the Best and Company Brewery with his four sons - the germ of the Pabst complex. Along with lager beer, Best brewed ale, porter and whiskey. When old Jacob retired in 1853, his brewery produced 2,500 barrels per year - the fourth largest brewery in Milwaukee. Frederick Pabst immigrated with his family from Thuringia, Germany in 1848. Young Frederick went to work on steamships, working his way up from cabin boy to captain. In 1862 he married Maria Best, granddaughter of Jacob Best and daughter of Phillip, who co-owned the old Best brewery. Two years later he joined the Best brewery, and in 1866 he and Emil Schandlein, another son-in-law, bought the business. This was right when beer consumption was growing. The brewery produced 5,000 barrels in 1864, 37,000 in 1870, and 114,000 in 1874. In 1868 Best was the largest brewery in Milwaukee. In 1889 the Best Company was renamed the Pabst Brewing Company. Production continued to grow and in 1892 Pabst was the largest brewer of lager in the world, with its sales increased 1,000% since 1872. That record was exchanged between Pabst, Anheuser-Busch, and Schlitz in following years. Pabst's brewery began innovating in the 1880s. It began using pure yeast culture to ferment the beer. Their engineers developed devices for washing barley, extracting hops, soaking bottles, making barrel staves, and rinsing kegs. Superintendent J. Fred Theurer and chemist Dr. Paul Fischer developed a way to reintroduce carbon dioxide into beer, which produced clearer beer than the old kraeusening process. Around 1890 Pabst helped get laws changed which had required barreling the beer solely to tax it, and then his engineers developed a way to pipe beer directly from vats into bottles. The facility was closed in 1997. On August 16, 2006, the brewery complex was purchased by Joseph Zilber's investment group Brewery Project LLC for $13 million to create The Brewery, a renovated complex for residential, office, and retail use. The Pabst Brewing Company Former Corporate Office Building & Visitor Center have been reopened as "Best Place," in reference to the brewery's founders Jacob Best and Phillip Best, and feature an antiques gift shop, Blue Ribbon Hall and the "Little Tavern on the Hill." Enclosed by the building are two courtyards, one of which houses a statue of Captain Frederick Pabst. A statue of King Gambrinus, the unofficial patron saint of beer, used to be displayed in the other courtyard, but was removed when the brewery was shut down in the mid-1990s. The sculpture was loaned back to the complex by the Pabst Corporation after a lengthy negotiation period on May 21, 2011.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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